Snooty Californian

[SonomaCat]

I have a kind of funny/kind of annoying story that I recently experienced.

In my job I get the "pleasure" of setting up lots of financial service institution meetings to let them come in and pitch their services to us. We are thinking about adding another fund manager to our rotation, so I have to suffer hearing basically the same pitch from various different companies.

We had Morgan Stanley come in for their pitch, and they brought out the heavyweights with the guy who founded their cash management services practice doing the main presentation. The presentation was largely unremarkable (we are the best... blah, blah, blah... we have better research... blah, blah, blah), but the most interesting parts usually come when I am walking them out of the building.

The fact that I grew up in Montana came up (as it usually does -- the "Where are you from originally?" question is the token business small talk in this transient part of California), and the bigwig told me his son had recently left Cal to go to U of M (I think he was in a specialized journalism program of some sort). I expressed my mock sympathy. He then made a funny face and said that he had been up to visit him recently, and he couldn't figure out why on earth his son wanted to be there -- there was nothing to do there. He kind of caught himself at that point and said that he was sure Bozeman was probably a lot better, since it was a bigger town and a lot more cosmopolitan. I said no, it was actually much smaller than Missoula, but that both towns actually had a lot of cultural and outdoorsy things to offer, so that must be why his son liked it. We were then at the door, so our conversation ended on that note with him knowing that he probably didn't impress me much with his "If it doesn't have over a million people, it's white trash" attitude.

Our Controller, who missed out on that part of the conversation, thought he was an arrogant ass from the presentation alone, so my experience just kind of topped it all off. I don't think they will be playing with our cash anytime soon.

One the opposite extreme, we had a UBS Warburg guy from Chicago come in to pitch to us, and when he found out that I went to school in Bozeman, he lit up and told me that he had a vacation house south of Livingston, and he raved about how much he loved it up there and how he always hauls his buddies out there to experience Livingston and Bozeman. Every time he goes back, I get a full recap of his recent adventures in Montana. He went to the top of Mount Baldy last weekend, I hear.

Those are the extreme ends of how the wealthy "city" people perceive Montana, I guess.

['93HonoluluCat]

Personally, I try to convince everyone I meet that Montana is horrible and that no one in their right mind ever would want to live there.

If I do that to enough people, maybe the property values in Gallatin County will come down enough for me to buy that land I've always wanted...